People with all sorts of medical conditions approach me. Some suffer from muscle tension, chronical headaches, metabolic diseases, knee problems, hip problems – many of those who come to me have given up on Western medicine or want to get a second opinion before an operation. You can often avoid operating through alternative treatments. My patients generally come with a disbalance in their natural equilibrium.

What does integral physical therapy mean to you? What's behind the healing process?

The patient needs to want their condition to improve and they have to work towards it. It’s a bit like an iceberg. Say my Achilles tendon is causing me pain, or I can’t move my arm anymore.

The cause is under the water s surface e tr to dive in, and nd out what it is. From an evolutionary standpoint, we are actually still hunte- gatherers. Our bodies and our jaws are engineered for 6-8 hours a day of precisely this sort of activity. What are we doing instead? We are sitting...it’ll take us 10,000 years to adapt. That’s why we have all these problems with the lower back.

What role does the foot play in all of this?

You have to imagine our body as an architecture: the legs are the columns, the feet are the fundament, the base of our bodies’ statics. What the foot can’t do, the knee has to do, what the knee can’t do, the hips have to take over. Every corn on your foot can affect your back. Reaction forces begin in the foot and are passed on. A well- posed foot means a well-posed musculoskeletal system, and that, in turn, means an optimal deployment of strength.

FALKE has recognised the role our feet play in relation to our overall well-being and helps to maintain a natural balance with design and engineering as seen in developments like the Ergono- mics Sport System. My work as a physical therapist meets FALKE’s ideology in a lot of ways and vice versa. This provides a lot of space for cooperation.